Articles from Vol. 66, No. 1, September/October

Leslie Holmes: [Talking with Sherrill Milnes at the NATS National Conference in Nashville (both start pronouncing Nashville and Louisville correctly).] You just gave one of the most meaningful and important, I think, keynote speeches I've ever heard,...

CINCO DE MAIO WILL NEVER BE THE SAME.On the morning of 5 May 2009, the community of voice practitioners suffered the loss of an international icon. Ironically, that same day, my wife Mary learned that she was approved for coverage by a health insurance...

ACCORDING TO RECENT SURVEYS done by NATS, about two-thirds of our membership teach in private studios and only about one out of three teaches in a university or college setting. As an officer of the Association and Associate Editor of "The Private Studio"...

Bright is the ring of wordsWhen the right man rings them,Fair the fall of songsWhen the singer sings them.-ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSONAUTHOR'S FOREWORDEVERYONE KEEPS FILES-often, too many. Though they may be put away and seemingly forgotten, at times we venture...

DIFFERENT OPINIONS ABOUND CONCERNING what constitutes a beautiful, well resonated tone in the singing voice. While many factors influence one's perception of tone color, let us entertain the notion that there are primarily two opposing extremes in timbre...

KURT ADLER RELATES AN ANECDOTE about the venerable French conductor, Pierre Monteux, who, upon returning to the Metropolitan Opera after an absence of about forty years, nonplussed the performers by thoroughly reworking their liaison instincts in performance...

[Editor's Note: This article represented Richard Miller's final contribution to the column that had borne his imprimatur for many years. It is an excerpt from a projected book, Singing in Western Civilization: Origins and Fruition. He wrote, "I realize...

Joan Sutherland-The Reluctant Prima Donna. (Kultur 4235; 60:00)Australian soprano Joan Sutherland has had her greatness celebrated in at least two major documentaries, which in itself is a testament to her importance as an artist and to the esteem and...

To the Editor,With the death on 5 May of Richard Miller the world of classical singing pedagogy lost one of its brightest luminaries. Richard was, in the opinion of many, the outstanding singing teacher of his generation. He was a man of wide culture,...

LIFE IS FINEEdward Knight, born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1961, has a background in jazz, classical, and theater composition, receiving his DMA from the University of Texas at Austin and touring Europe as a jazz trumpeter. He is currently Professor of...

AND THE GOOD NEWS IS . . .I certainly need not tell any of you that we are in troubled economic times. As I write this letter, it is early May, 2009, but the long lead times required for publication mean you will not read these words until September,...

FROM OCTOBER 1952 TO JANUARY 1953, Samuel Barber (1910-1981) set ten Irish poems to music in a work entitled Hermit Songs, which has become one of his best known works.1 In addition to performances of the entire opus, individual songs often are excerpted...

In memoriam: A very special loss of a very special lifeRichard Miller passed away on May 5, 2009. This has entailed a major adjustment. I was always sure in my own mind that Richard would outlive me. He never smoked and I did for years. He took very...

ARE YOU READY TO CAP OFF your singing and teaching career with a book? If your desk and drawers are full of notes and sketches you made on the fly while teaching (or thinking behind stage), or if you feel that you must systematize your storehouse of...

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS THE FOURTH and final excerpt from Julius Stockhausens A Method of Singing that will be offered here. Stockhausen issued what seems to be a condensed version of his book (published in 1884) serially in Edgar S. Werner's The Voice,...

TALES NOT TOLDEdward Knight's most recent song cycle, Tales Not Told, takes as its subject matter the lives of six American pioneer women who lived and died in extraordinary times. Each was a heroine in her own way: Helen Paddock, the Civil War widow...

WELCOME TO THE FIRST INSTALLMENT of "Mindful Voice," a new column dedicated to the interface between voice pedagogy and cognitive science. It has been almost twenty years since the 1990s were designated the United States' Decade of the Brain by presidential...

INTRODUCTIONTHE PHYSIOLOGY OF HUMAN ACTIVITY has been extensively investigated and integrated into the science of exercise physiology. Skeletal muscles throughout the body share common characteristics, including basic mechanisms of action, biochemical...

AS I BEGIN WRITING THIS PIECE in April of 2009, one of my students is heading to New York City to do a callback audition for the soon-to-be Broadway show, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. What won her the callback was her rendition of Pat Benatar's "Heartbreaker"...